Antique

The Broad Museum, on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, opens Sunday. Admission is free.

Los Angeles is getting a new contemporary art museum, courtesy of billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and his wife Edythe. Their free museum opens Sunday.

Surrounded by the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Music Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Broad is already an architectural landmark, with its honeycomb-like exoskeleton.

"This shell of sorts, this light filter, this amazing sculptural structure ... enrobes the museum," says Joanne Heyler, the museum's director and chief curator.

Traveling up through the middle of the building in the round, glass elevator you can peek inside what's known as "the vault"— an entire floor storing the Broads' collection of more than 2,000 paintings, photos and sculptures.

On the top floor, diffused natural light pours in through skylights. There's work here from Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Keith Haring, Cindy Sherman and Chris Burden. There's an entire room for Takashi Murakami. The collection includes a lot of L.A. artists, Heyler says.

Despite the insane art market, the Broads have no trouble purchasing the art they like. "It's simple," says Heyler. "If there's a work of interest, we acquire it. There's no committee process. There isn't a long, drawn-out bureaucratic process to follow."



Eli and Edythe Broad have been collectors for more than 40 years.
From his office in L.A.'s Century City neighborhood, Eli Broad, 82, can look out over the many of the cultural institutions he's helped fund — the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and now, his museum.
"We want this to be a gift to the city of Los Angeles," he says. "We've been collectors now going on 45 years."

Broad says building his museum took longer and cost more than he thought it would. But he wanted a permanent home for his collection so people could see it and enjoy it.

"We wanted to share it with the broadest possible public," he says. "That's why we have free admission."
Forbes estimates Eli Broad is worth $7.4 billion. He made his fortune building suburban tract homes, and also running an insurance company. He and his wife bought their first artwork — a van Gogh drawing — and then quickly switched to collecting contemporary art. He says they liked buying works with social or political meaning. And along the way, they've gotten to know the artists personally.



With skylights and the "interior veil," light streams into The Broad's third floor galleries.

He remembers artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose at age 27, smoking pot in their powder room. He says the first time he saw Basquiat's work in New York he was drawn to it "because it wasn't just graffiti, it was very thoughtful," Broad says.

He recalls seeing Cindy Sherman's work for the first time in a gallery on Mercer Street in New York. "We followed her career and have 120 of her works," he says.

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